This past weekend, I preached on the way that Jesus’ cross renews us in two senses according to Colossians 2. By “erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands,” it shreds all the clutter of the spiritual collection agencies that are haunting our souls with reminders of the debt that we owe for our sins. Then being liberated from this clutter, the cross and resurrection are something we can experience on a personal spiritual level as we... Read more
A little more than a year ago, I discovered the music of Zach Sobiech, a high school student from Minnesota who died of osteosarcoma May 20th of last year. Zach and his friend Sammy Brown had made a band called A Firm Handshake. Their music is incredibly good and it’s in regular rotation on my car iPhone mix. My favorite three songs are “Clouds,”“Fix Me Up,” and “Sandcastles.” Now Zach’s mother Laura has released a book about their journey that... Read more
I’ve gotten a little behind on my sermon podcasts again. This one is from two Sundays ago, focusing on Colossians 1:21-22: “And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly bodythrough death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.” It’s important that we are not merely reconciled in Christ as an idea, but we are reconciled in his fleshly body. … Read more
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the way that the middle-class church is being undermined by social pressures that cause parents to overprogram their kids and check out of church. I flippantly mentioned soccer games and Boy Scout campouts as the competition we face for Sunday morning worship. In doing this, I hadn’t really stopped to consider how God could work in an environment like a Boy Scout campout. One of my readers Greg Nelson, the Scoutmaster of Troop... Read more
In a recent blog post, Asbury Theological Seminary president Timothy Tennent claimed that the real dividing line in United Methodism is not between “conservative” and “liberal” but between “orthodox” and “heterodox.” Since he gave few supporting details for his claim, I wasn’t sure which heterodoxies he was talking about. Does he mean when the Boy Scouts march an American flag into a church sanctuary as part of a Christian worship service? Or when a church council uses secular business strategic... Read more
I stumbled across a beautiful passage in my scripture reading today: 1 Timothy 4:4-5. Paul says to Timothy: “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer.” In this context, Paul is polemicizing against the false asceticism of a gnostic group that was promoting a false gospel, basically telling people that creation was evil which caused them to “forbid marriage... Read more
The more that I think about the recent Supreme Court ruling defending the use of explicitly Christian prayer to open government meetings, the more it offends me. I have no problem praying in public. I do it all the time walking on the sidewalk mumbling the Jesus Prayer to myself with my prayer beads. When somebody else needs prayer, I don’t have any problem laying hands on them in the middle of a Walmart or any other public space. I... Read more
At our LifeSign contemporary worship service, our post-Easter sermon series “Resurrected” is a journey through the book of Colossians looking at how we can be resurrected together with Jesus Christ. For our first week of this sermon last week, we focused on Colossians 1:13: “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.” Audio is below. Please sign up for the podcast. … Read more
I don’t go out of my way to befriend fundamentalists on facebook, but because of the anonymity of the Christian blogger networking world, I’ve happened to acquire a few complete strangers as facebook friends who turned out to be fundamentalists. The other day, I saw one of them holding forth in my newsfeed saying that contemplative prayer was a heresy as well as the “new-agey” concept of “mystical union” with Christ (aren’t the academic Calvinists writing books about this?), so... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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Stop trolling! Seven ways to be a better internet critic
One of the real poverties of our digital age is the lack of authentic constructive criticism that happens in our online discourse. This is because we have ghettoized ourselves tribally according to ideological litmus tests, so the only interactions we have with people we actually disagree with are psychological warfare meant to rattle them with snarky zingers (a.k.a. “trolling”) rather than a genuine attempt to help others get past problems we perceive in their thinking. Imagine if you took responsibility... Read more